How to Make the World a Better Place

Want to make a difference in the world? Most of us yearn for a sense of meaning or purpose in life, or maybe we just want to model altruism for our children. But even when we start out from a sense of duty, that initial sense of sacrifice often evolves into exhilaration and satisfaction. Our efforts to help others may have a somewhat mixed record of success, but they have an almost perfect record of helping ourselves. So, here’s how to go out and change the world!

It Has Never Been Easier to Make a Difference

Putting your money in the hands of the best organizations is the simplest way to help.

Trying to help others used to be about writing checks at the end of the year, mailing them off and then hoping the money helped. Over the last 20 years, there has been a transformation, and there are now ways to use the internet to connect to those you help, plus a huge array of concrete evidence to show what organizations are effective in using your money — and which ones aren’t.

One basic rule: Spend money as intelligently as you make it. Too often, we give not to the causes that are most effective, but rather to those that are best at asking for it. So we get a phone call from some random organization we’ve never heard of, and the caller mentions “children with cancer” or “retired firefighters” or something else that sounds noble, and we promise a donation. We would never buy a television from some caller we know nothing about, and we shouldn’t donate to organizations that have great marketing but whose work we know nothing about.

Here are a few great resources to help you pick causes and organizations:

Givewell.org is a website started by a group of hedge fund analysts, and it applies the same financial rigor to nonprofits, trying to assess how much good they will do with your money. I like Givewell partly because it recommends many of the same wonkish causes that I do, such as iodizing salt and fighting malaria.

Charity Navigator offers an encyclopedic listing of organizations, but too many users simply look at the percentage of income spent on administrative expenses. That number can be relevant if a nonprofit spends 90 percent of its money on salaries and office space, but in general what matters most is simply impact. If an organization is highly effective at saving lives and achieves this in part by spending more money on the back office, that’s fine.

Look Beyond Your Backyard

One of the age-old disputes is: Should I help abroad or at home? Some people say, Let’s solve the problems in our own backyard first, before we worry about problems half a world away.

Here’s how I see the issue: An aid group abroad can save more lives more cheaply than an organization in the United States, and generally can do more good with less money. For example, $100 can send a girl to school for a year in Malawi, while that sum accomplishes rather less at home. I also think that our compassion shouldn’t depend on the color of someone’s skin, or the color of someone’s passport; on balance most of my giving is overseas.

But I also worry that in some affluent circles in the United States, it is “cool” to help out in Zimbabwe in a way that it isn’t in one’s own town, and that seems equally misguided. We have huge needs both at home and abroad.

The internet can help you find a good cause and make it fun. For example, if you’re interested in international issues, check out GlobalGiving.org, which lists organizations big and little around the world and lets you donate to them. For microlending, an organization called Kiva.org does something similar, lending sums as small as $25 to aspiring small businesses in poor countries around the world. I once visited a baker in Afghanistan to whom I had lent small sums on Kiva to grow his business. And, yes, that was thrilling (but understand that sums lent through Kiva are lumped together for efficiency so that your money may not go exactly to the person whose photo you see). At home, a similar website is donorschoose.org, which allows people to make small gifts to projects at disadvantaged schools around the country; I’ve supported class journalism projects through donorschoose,org, and it’s tremendously rewarding to know exactly where your money is going.

Give of Your Time

The rewards of volunteering are often greater than those of monetary donations.

In this guide, I will mostly talk about how to find an aid group and support it financially, but if you are unable to write a check, there are other ways to help. Indeed, the rewards of volunteering are sometimes even greater, because you see the beneficiaries right in front of you. So apart from writing checks, some ways to help include:

Mentor a Child. Organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters or iMentor, give crucial support to young people who need it. There’s always a shortage of mentors, particularly for boys.

Use your experience. If you have health care expertise, check out Remote Area Medical, which uses volunteers to provide dental and medical care to the uninsured at health fairs in poor parts of the country. Outside of health care, websites like VolunteerMatch and Catchafire connect people with particular expertise to organizations that can benefit from those skills.

Take a Gap Year. Especially if you’re a student, consider a gap year or a gap semester volunteering for an aid project somewhere in the world, as a mini Peace Corps experience that may open your eyes. Websites like Omprakash and Idealist.org offer an enormous number of places to volunteer.

Be a Donor. One really easy way to help? Give blood and sign up to donate organs.

Be an Advocate. Use your voice to advocate for those who can’t be heard. One great organization that does that is Results, which trains volunteers to lobby for global development, early childhood and other issues. Another option is the CARE Action Network.

Think Beyond Wrapping Paper. For birthdays, Christmas or Mother’s/Father’s Day, give “gifts of meaning,” such as a donation to an organization. For example, my kids gave me a Father’s Day gift of a “hero rat” that sniffs out landmines in Angola, through a group called Apopo. And for Mother’s Day, check out Mother’s Day Movement. Want more ideas? Every year, I have a holiday column suggesting organizations for gifts of meaning: Here are these columns for 2017,2016, and 2015.

Focus on Women and Girls

All too often, inequity attaches itself to gender.

One of the most effective ways to make a difference is to invest in women and girls around the world. That’s because almost everywhere you look, inequity attaches itself to gender. Globally, moms even tend to breastfeed their sons longer than they do their daughters. Only one company in six worldwide has a female top manager. Girls are 50 percent more likely than boys to never attend any school at all, according to Unesco. A United Nations study of 10,000 men in the Asia/Pacific region found that almost one-quarter acknowledged having raped a woman.

So I’m a particular believer in programs that get girls into school and keep them there, or that help empower women more broadly. There are many ways to do that, so here are five suggestions:

Camfed, short for the Campaign for Female Education, focuses on girls’ education in Africa and does an excellent job. In addition, other mainstream groups like Save the Children also do an impressive job on girls’ education.

“Deworming” sounds like a health intervention, but researchers in Kenya found that deworming children keeps them in school longer and reduces drop-out rates. Indeed, the Kenya studies found that the cheapest way to get a marginal child in the school system isn’t by building schools, but by deworming children. One group that does a great job at this is Deworm the World another is the End Fund.

One of the most successful programs to help women is the Village Savings & Loan Association, or VSLA. It’s a microsavings program that helps villagers save small amounts of money and invest in small businesses, and it turns out that when women have some savings and income they are treated much better by their husbands and male neighbors, and they can raise their children better. The aid group CARE is a pioneer in VSLAs. (This family in Malawi is a great example of how a little structured saving and entrepreneurship can change lives through fritters.)

The Fistula Foundation repairs childbirth injuries called obstetric fistulas that leave women incontinent, smelly and humiliated. The Foundation has supported fistula surgeries in many parts of the world, restoring hope to women and girls who thought that their lives were essentially over. I’ve never seen a smile to match that of a teenage girl whose fistula has been repaired, who has her life back.

Want to get your friends and family more involved? Form a chapter of a group called Dining for Women. Members of the chapter meet for a potluck dinner, and then donate the money saved (by not eating out) to a great women’s cause. This combines fun with making a difference for those who need it.

Help Provide the Basics

Simple, cheap health interventions can have huge impacts.

The low-hanging fruit to save lives worldwide is typically improvements to health and nutrition. I’ll never forget a trip to Cambodia where I met a grandmother who was looking after four grandchildren, after the mom had died of malaria. The grandma had one mosquito bed net that could accommodate three children, so every evening she had to decide which child would go unprotected — and she naturally found this agonizing. Meanwhile, a bed net costs $5.

Inexpensive Health Interventions

It’s hard to beat a health intervention like a bed net for $5, potentially saving a life, or a $5 HPV vaccination that can prevent cervical cancer, or a water treatment point to reduce the risk of children dying from tainted water. Groups like Partners in Health, Against Malaria Foundation and Path do remarkable work on these health-related issues. A small group called Innovating Health International focuses on cervical and breast cancer treatment in Haiti, saving lives very efficiently. Here's an article I wrote about cervical cancer and how easy it is to prevent.

Nutrition

I’ve also come to be a big believer in nutrition programs, partly because malnutrition is a factor in 45 percent of deaths of young children globally (and almost six million children die worldwide each year before reaching the age of 5). Some of these deaths can be averted fairly simply with micronutrients like zinc or vitamin A. Or by something as low-tech as promotion of exclusive breastfeeding for six months — some 800,000 children die annually from sub-optimal breastfeeding. Groups like Helen Keller International do a remarkable job promoting better nutrition, and fighting blindness too.

Preserving Sight

Speaking of blindness, that’s another transformational impact that one can have for a modest sum. In poor countries, blindness is much more common than in the West, and often for very simple reasons. It may be because of Vitamin A deficiency, or river blindness, or trachoma, or cataracts. All these are simple and cheap to address. I’ve seen Helen Keller International distribute vitamin A to children or battle trachoma — an infectious disease that is an exceptionally painful way to go blind — with simple surgery by nurses, and with donated antibiotics. Likewise, a group called the Himalayan Cataract Project does cataract surgery for just $25 a patient. It feels like a miracle to watch a patient remove the bandage and see again after that surgery. For a glimpse of its work, see this column I wrote about its work in Nepal.

You want to see gratitude? Meet a person who just recovered his or her ability to see.

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Make a Lifelong Impact by Helping a Child

Stop the cycles of poverty by helping our youngest global citizens.

One reason efforts to break cycles of poverty haven’t been more successful is that we often start too late. A vast amount of evidence has accumulated over the last 25 years showing that the first 1,000 days of life, when the brain is growing quickly, are crucially important for a person’s long-term wellbeing. Yet too often we allow a child to be traumatized or neglected, or to suffer lead poisoning or malnutrition, in ways that may have lifelong consequences.

For example, one reason I emphasize malnutrition is that almost one-fourth of children worldwide are physically stunted from malnutrition. We see the physical impairment, but what we can’t see is the mental stunting as well, the cognitive impairments that will hold a person back — and a country back — for decades afterward. Groups like Action Against Hunger aren’t just helping kids get a full tummy, but are also laying the groundwork for a strong adulthood.

In the United States as well, there’s overwhelming evidence that early childhood programs make an enormous difference in the lives of disadvantaged kids. Here are several organizations doing work on early childhood in the states:

Nurse-Family Partnership is the gold standard of early interventions. A nurse meets regularly with at risk-moms during pregnancy and until the child is 2 years old, covering topics ranging from avoiding drugs and lead paint to helping with anger management. The results are tremendous: Many years later, those children are more successful as teenagers and adults.

Reach Out and Read is a simple program in which doctors “prescribe” reading to low-income children and gives simple books to the moms. If the mother can’t read, the doctor shows how to turn the pages while talking to the child about the pictures. This is simple and cheap, yet follow-up studies show that the children are more likely to be read to and get bigger vocabularies.

Youth Villages is for teenagers who are in trouble and it has an excellent record coaching family members to support those teens and keep them in school and on the right side of the law. It too has been rigorously studied and proved its benefits.

About the Author

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His most recent best-selling books are "A Path Appears" and "Half the Sky"; in his free time, he tries to make the world a better place.

Illustrations by Naomi Wilkinson. This guide offered exclusively to New York Times subscribers for a limited time.